The Farmstead

Drowning by Numbers (1988). A woman, her daught, and her niece are all named Cissie, drown their husbands, and depend on the local coroner Madgett (Bernard Hill) to cover up their crimes.

This is a surrealist late-80s comedy meditating on death and also games and numbers of various kinds, which is to say it feels very much of a piece with Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead, except for having no Shakespeare and being more focused on female characters. It's all nonsense; nobody is really a real person here, and that's fine. It's also pretty horny in various ways, and in fact Madgett proposes to each of the Cissies in turn. You kind of want him to succeed with one or possibly all of them.

If you want a sense of what you're in for with this movie, Madgett's introduction gives you a pretty good one.

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The Bride! (2026). Maggie Gyllenhaal directs this riff on the Frankenstein mythos, this time a sometime-musical Bonnie and Clyde story about Frankenstein's creature Frank (Christian Bale), still alive in the 1930s, and the bride (Jessie Buckley) that he talks a mad scientist into "reinvigorating" for him. The dead woman thus invigorated was a mobster's call girl, but she doesn't remember any of that anymore. Sometimes Mary Shelley talks to her for some reason.

If you get the sense from this description that this movie has a lot going on, you are correct. I would say this movie is less than the sum of its parts, but I really enjoy several of those parts. Buckley is fantastic, and Annette Bening as Doctor Euphronius is delightful. The big dance number is fun. The movie has a lot of style and is sometimes cheekily anachronistic.

The various pieces don't ever really cohere; there are too many of them. And some of the pieces I enjoyed less, like the Overboard-style plot where our revived gal thinks she's still alive and was already married to Frank before her "accident." The subplot of her being occasionally literally possessed by Mary Shelley was just baffling to me. I get that it was supposed to be thematic, but: why. But, the movie tackles all its various tones and themes with a lot of energy and verve, and overall I found a lot to enjoy.

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Send Help (2026). A frumpy woman who dreams of competing on Survivor crashlands on an island with her horrible boss.

This is a psychological thriller by Sam Raimi, and it took me a long time to go see it because ~suspense movies about people chasing each other around trying to kill each other aren't usually my thing. (See also: every home invasion movie except You're Next.) But! We don't really get that until the end, and in the meantime, Rachel McAdams is delightful as Linda Little, who's competent and helpful to a fault until she's finally pushed too far. I love how much of a glow-up Linda gets the longer they stay on the island. There were also some late developments that I really liked.

It's not breaking any new ground, but it's fun and well-executed. If you support women's wrongs(tm), I think you'll enjoy this.

Here are a couple of my favorite winter soup recipes. They're from cookbooks, so no handy online version to link to. So this is for you and also for me, so I can access these away from my cookbooks.

( Pork and hominy soup )

( Sausage, White Bean, and Kale Soup With Besar )